Sleep tight.

I’m tired. I’m tired of being told how much sleep I should be having. It makes me anxious and then I can’t sleep properly, and to be honest there are already enough obstacles that get lodged in between me and a solid nights sleep; none of them good, before you ask. Sadly, we live in a world where personal mental wellbeing is amongst the most prized possessions imaginable, something which is, ironically, pretty much unimaginable to most people who have something other than nothing going on in their lives, and the number one factor that sets you off on the path towards true happiness isn’t love or money, sex or fame, drugs or murder. Oh no, what you really need is a jolly good nights sleep. Good luck with that.

Sleep, good sleep, is a very highly valued commodity and no matter what worries you the most, be it death, divorce, employment, addiction, finances or a substandard wheelie bin collection service, it will always seem a lot worse if you can’t manage to tuck away a good run of forty winks on a regular basis. Every poor bugger who has ever faced the serious end of the interrogation business will undoubtedly have faced a fat slap of sleep deprivation, usually by a bored guard simply switching on the lights or playing a selection of hits by Metallica loud enough to make your fillings drop out. It seems to be a very effective way of thoroughly breaking the mind, heart and soul of a human being and it is also very cheap and very clean, which is probably why it went down so well (for some at least) in Guantanamo Bay. And it just goes to show how vital sleep is. There’s air, water, food and sleep, and then after that the rest suddenly seem like luxuries.

I can’t remember the last time I slept a full night through. I mean proper sleep, toxic free, clean as a whistle. Golden slumbers and all that. It must be years and years ago. The experts say that an adult needs between 7 and 9 hours sleep a night which means, at the least, falling asleep at 10 at night and waking at 5 in the morning without a single interruption. And if I managed to stretch that out to 7 in the morning I’d be late for work, so that isn’t very helpful. The experts, the other experts that is, also say that every individual has slightly or more than slightly different sleeping needs and that it shouldn’t worry you too much if you only get 6 or 5 or 4 or even fewer hours of nodding a night. That may be true, but when you wake up at 2 o’clock every morning you can’t help but think there may be a tiny little thing to worry about: namely that you’re awake and as far as you know everyone else is asleep. The lucky bastards.

They say, the experts that is, that we can all enjoy a good night’s sleep provided we do exactly the right things before going to bed. In fact it would seem that sleep in the modern era requires the application of such abstemiousness and self control that it is something only achievable by an extremely serious monk. You should never eat before 6pm, better make that 4pm, and you should never drink alcohol after Loose Women has finished. In fact, it is better to consume all your daily booze allowance before midday to give your system a chance to redress the balance and prepare for a nice bit of nighty night sleepy tight time. All other consumable stimulants are off the menu too, as well as anything else that might leave the mind buzzing or stir up ideas very most un-worth thinking about for the rest of the night: looking at your phone, watching television, gaming, looking out of the window, doing the washing up, answering your phone, looking at your phone again, having a phone, opening the fridge, going to the toilet, being on the toilet, coming back from the toilet, talking about the toilet, lighting candles, putting out candles, talking with anyone at all about anything, doing work, thinking about work, remembering that you have a job at all and anything to do with sugar. As for cigarettes? Well, you might as well take up an expensive cocaine habit and forget about sleep altogether. And that’s the choice you have to make, if you want to sleep like a log – just give up everything that gives you any pleasure or facilitates any sort of mental spark, because if you don’t you’ll be thinking about it all fucking night. Every fucking night. And even if you are as good as a very good little monkey you’ll still have the noise.

Noise at night time isn’t anybody’s friend, or certainly not mine. Some people can fall asleep anywhere, in almost any condition, and I envy those people more than is helpful to do so. Personally, I could (if I was lucky) fall asleep on the outskirts of London and be woken up by a shrew farting in Cambodia. Such is my sensitivity to noise at night I can hear glaciers melting on Bouvet Island and cherry blossom hitting a picnic blanket in Okinawa. I can hear the breeze on the stillest night and I can hear a fox thinking about sex several miles away. In short, at night I am afforded the hearing of a particularly well endowed (ear-speaking) bat. And when I wake up, well before it is welcome, I am getting better and better at telling the time without, er, telling the time. Those experts (I’ve lost count by now) say that if you wake up in the night the very worst thing you can do (relatively speaking, of course) is look at your phone because that will unleash torrents of blue poison (and whatever not-so-good messages you may have been sent), and so I just listen – to the frequency of the traffic, to the birds in the trees that stay awake all night and chatter and chatter and chatter, and to the sound of the first train to roll through the station. And no matter what time it is I just roll over and try to sleep again, knowing that repeated failure doesn’t always end up with success. It’s not a lot of fun but I’m beginning to start to begin to make my peace with it; a peace that will never come. To sleep a sleep and perchance to dream something worth waking up to remember. I don’t want to sleep when I’m dead. I just want to sleep like I’m dead, and then wake up in good form. At least there is some comfort in knowing I can’t be the only one, at least according to the experts. I wonder how the experts sleep. Bloody experts.

G B Burton. 24.03.2024